The Birth of Jesus and the power of the Empire

When we hear Matthew’s story of the Nativity, our natural response is to ask what it means to us today. But let us try to listen in the way that Christians in the 1^st century might have listened. How would it have sounded to them?

The gospel of Matthew, written perhaps about 80 AD, probably came from the ancient city of Antioch on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. Antioch was the capital of the Roman province of Syria. Four Roman military legions were stationed there, including the notorious 10^th legion which had taken a leading role in the destruction of Jerusalem. Antioch was thus a military city and a centre of Roman power. There was a lively church there (Acts 11:19-26; 13:1-3). The terrible bloodshed of the Jewish war 66-70 AD and the destruction of the temple would still be fresh in people’s minds.

Matthew and Isaiah

Isaiah was the favourite scripture of the early church. It was believed that all the major events of the life and death of Jesus were described in this prophetic book. It is not surprising then that when Matthew wanted to present the early traditions about the birth of Jesus Christ he asked his listeners to hear his account against the background of Isaiah. The section of Isaiah that is selected for this purpose was also very significant. Matthew drew his material from Isaiah chapters 7-9, using quotations from Isaiah 7:14 and Isaiah 9:1-2 as the bookends of his account. You can find his quotations in Matthew 1:22-23 and 4:14-16. I call these “bookends” because the earlier part of Matthew 1 is basically the family tree of Jesus and Chapter 4:17 introduces the public ministry of Jesus.

 

What was the background of Isaiah 7-9?

These chapters describe the dangerous expansion of the Assyrian empire in the late 8^th century BC. An alliance of two small states just to the north of Judah was trying to set up resistance to Assyria and threatening to take over Judah to create a combined block to stop the Assyrians. Isaiah’s message to King Ahaz was that a young woman would have the courage to name her new baby “God with us” (Emmanuel) in spite of the threatening war clouds, but that in any case the Assyrians would soon invade the little states, leaving the kingdom of Judah intact.

Once again, in the first century AD, the land of Palestine had been swallowed up by the irresistible power of a pagan empire. The sacred territories of Naphtali and Zebulon, north of Judah, were under the power of the Roman soldiers commanded from Antioch. But once again a deliverer would be sent, like Joshua, and the occupied territories in the north would soon be freed (Matthew 4:16). The “Galilee of the Gentiles” (verse 15), ie the sacred lands now trodden by pagans, would be restored.

This is why the child of promise was called Joshua. “Jesus” is simply the Greek form of the name. This is why the empire represented by the puppet king Herod in Matthew 2 tried to destroy the baby, why in Chapter 4 vv 8 and 9 Matthew describes the world empires as being under the power of the devil, why another Roman puppet king arrested John the Baptist (4:12) and why at last the empire succeeded in destroying Jesus (Matthew 27). But the empire did not have the last word.

Millions of hungry people today still live under the power of an empire based upon Western military might and money. We live on the inside of the empire. Does Matthew still have a message for us today?

John M. Hull

Test yourself against the Five Marks of Mission

Christian mission has changed. It used to be thought of as churches in Britain sending missionaries abroad. These missionaries were selected, trained and sent by special agents, the missionary societies of the various denominations.

 

Today, mission is from everywhere to everywhere. The missionary agencies have either changed their role or even ceased to function. Instead of thinking of missionaries as special agents, we now think of the church as a whole as being called to mission, and of every Christian as sharing in that call. Moreover, the mission thinking of the worldwide church is now that the church does not even have a mission. It does not have a mission; it is a mission. The mission is the mission of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit engaged in a huge project to love and redeem the whole of creation.

 

In seeking to understand what the mission of God might mean, in 1984 the Anglican communion worldwide recommended five marks of mission as a sort of checklist - http://www.anglicancommunion.org/ministry/mission/fivemarks.cfm. In 1996 the general synod of the Church of England adopted these, which are now known as “the five marks of mission”. Would you like to test your own Christian life against the expectations of these marks? If that seems a bit too personal, then perhaps you would like to assess the life of our own church in Kings Heath as a mission church. Here we go!

 

The first mark of mission is to proclaim the Kingdom of God. This expression is taken from the teaching of Jesus himself, who saw the Kingdom of God coming in his words and deeds. In what ways do we bear witness to the Kingdom of God?

 

The second mark is to call people into discipleship to Jesus Christ and to nurture them in faith. The Holy Spirit does that through us whenever a child is baptised or people are prepared for confirmation. How else do we do it?

 

The third mark of mission is to extend loving care to the community. This is where we really score! Surely the medical centre, the services to young people and senior citizens, to say nothing of the village square are all extending care to the Kings Heath community.

 

The fourth mark of mission is a tricky one. It is to transform the unjust structures of society. What is an unjust structure? Can sincerely good people find themselves working in unjust structures? Who benefits from the unjust structures, and how can these be identified, challenged and changed? Clearly, these are important questions for our society and for the world: about the growing gulf between rich and poor, and about the worldwide situation of hunger, sickness and war. How does our church measure up to this mark of mission?

 

The fifth mark of mission is to strive to protect creation and to restore the face of the earth. Here again, as with the third mark, perhaps we are doing rather well in All Saints. After all, we are an eco congregation and are about to have solar panels installed on at least one of our buildings.

 

How do you respond to the five marks? Should every Christian be involved to some degree in all five? Is it right for a particular congregation to specialise in one or two of these? What steps can we take to ensure that through our lives, our worship and our witness the whole mission of God is being expressed?

 

John M. Hull

The Queen's Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education

3 September 2012

Theological Discussion: Knowing Jesus

10th July 2012

Social Justice and Christian faith

A review of‘Knowing Jesus’ by James Alison, SPCK, London 1993

(1)The resurrection

Alison begins in the first chapter of his short book by rejecting the assumption that talk about entering into a personal encounter with Jesus – ‘knowing Jesus’ – is a special language reserved to Protestants or charismatics. Rather, he claims that it is a central theological idea. He will explore the idea as formative ‘for what it means to be a Christian at the end of the twentieth century’.

He avoids the ‘objectivity/subjectivity’ trap by adopting the idea of ‘witness’ and in particular the apostolic witness as it was forged by the experience of Jesus’ resurrection for his followers. He argues that without the resurrection there would have been nothing to witness about. As other theologians have strongly argued, the gospels are not to be read as some kind of ‘history’ or biography, of which the resurrection and the post-resurrection appearances are the last chapter. Rather the gospel account is to be read as the apostles ‘rewriting of their experience of the last years before the resurrection in its light’ (p6). It follows that the only way we have access to Jesus is that we have received the witness of his resurrection.

The rest of the book is an exploration of this idea and what it may be to know this Jesus.

The disciples were not only witnesses of the resurrection but from it. This is a central idea of the first chapter. Alison argues that the gospel accounts, and indeed the events to which Acts and the early history of the church point, reveal a radical re-thinking of the whole of their lives and relationship with culture, values, God.

In the aftermath of his death, Jesus’ followers were conscious of acute personal danger - fear mixed with the sense of their own betrayal and guilt – psychological responses ‘either present or hinted at in the NT texts’ (p11). Alison emphasises at this point that the texts now bear witness to an event, the resurrection, that happened to Jesus i.e. that was first and foremost seen as happening to him, not as a series of events or understandings worked through in the lives of the disciples in his absence following his killing.

Alison analyses this firstly in terms of the notion of gratuity,when something is given wholly outside any interest accruing to the giver. The resurrection was an act of gratuitous love by the Father, firstly to Jesus and then to his followers. It was utterly ‘other’, completely outside any possible frame of reference, hence the consternation expressed in the accounts when the disciples failed at first to recognise what was happening. However, in spite of being utterly other, Jesus was also recognisable. Furthermore, Jesus was not given back as a ghost or a haunting or an accusation but in an act recognisable as ‘the giving back of a freely loving person’ (p15).

Secondly, Alison analyses the resurrection in terms of its being an act of forgiveness. The fear and guilt that the disciples had been feeling appear to have been ‘loosed’ through the gratuitous loving presence.

Thirdly, the resurrection is to be understood as mission. The utterly other, present as forgiveness,‘is given so as to be given’, sending the disciples off to the ends of the earth.

Finally, Alison discusses aspects of interpretation bearing upon the resurrected Jesus. The resurrection is to be understood as the whole life and death of Jesus being given back gratuitously. So for Paul, the only direct witness of Jesus as the resurrected one after his ascension, Jesus is crucially the persecuted and risen Lord. Being involved in persecuting the followers of Jesus, Paul came to understand , in a radical and life-changing act, that‘The gratuitous presence was that of the crucified one. Not as accusation, but as forgiveness’. (p22)

Jesus appears at the resurrection as fully human. But the physical appearances end, bringing up the question as to the difference between the way Jesus was present to the apostles in his resurrection appearances and how he was present to them– and us – thereafter. In Luke, God sends the Holy Spirit from on high; in John, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that makes available to us the whole of Jesus’ life, including the death and the resurrection, in its gratuitous and forgiving love. Alison is it pains to stress that the Holy Spirit is not some vague and numinous ethereal cloud but the divine reality at work at the human level. In other words, to know God we need to enter ever more into the human experience of faith and allow that to be deepened.

(2) The intelligence of the victim

In this chapter Alison outlines for the first time the central creative thought of the book, i.e. what he understands as the radical re-focalising, through the resurrection, of an understanding of ‘the intelligence of the victim’.

‘ As a result of the resurrection of Jesus the disciples underwent a profound shift in their understanding, such that they were able to understand something about human life and relationships that had never really been understood before. That something was, to put it simply, the relationship between God and victims.’ (p34)

He points out that the gospels are written out of the experience of the resurrection. They describe the mis-understandings of the disciples and other followers juxtaposed with Jesus’ profound understanding of where he was going, what was going to happen to him and why. In other words, the disciples had come to understand the whole drift of Jesus’ life as having been lived towards the passion. Unlike themselves, Jesus had possessed all along ‘the intelligence of the victim’. The Old Testament prophecies embedded in Jesus’ discourses suggest Jesus’ own profound understanding of Jewish sacred text.

But Jesus is not to be seen as a special man with arcane knowledge. The gospel accounts make it clear that time and time again Jesus had tried to explain to his disciples but that they had not been able to grasp what he could see and had even opposed it. The disciples, in short, like ourselves, had a background of understanding, survival techniques, a self-deception dependent on exclusion. The experience of Jesus after the resurrection enabled them to go back over what he had been trying to communicate and finally to make sense of what he had been saying. Alison reviews this over three major themes in Jesus’ teaching:

a)Moral issues – the inner logic of the Sermon on the Mount and other moral teaching is that the key feature of blessedness which involves a rejection of the violent power structures of the world necessarily involves the risk of becoming a victim. The intelligence of the victim is shown in the passage about the last judgement as universal, not just applied to Jesus, and where God is‘in the midst of the violence, on the side of the victims’ (43).

The ‘life of human freedom leading to persecution which Jesus was teaching his disciples’ (48) is in no way to be understood as a kind of victim paranoia but rather that Jesus’ whole life came to be understood as a free self-giving in opposition to a society which created vulnerable and victimised groups and which to a great degree depended on understandings of exclusion in order to function. Jesus gave himself to be a victim, not because he wanted to die, but because his act of self-giving led to sacrifice as incidental, accidental to the self-giving purpose of his life.

b)Discipleship Following the resurrection, the disciples come to understand their own discipleship in terms of their calling and the preparation that Jesus had been giving them. Key to this is the idea of the skandalonor stumbling block. Jesus has stressed non-rivalistic imitation, based on his own imitation of the Father. The followers had been scandalised by the death of Jesus and his failure to deliver on their hopes. The resurrection removed the scandal without taking away the death. More than this, it opened up to the followers the possibility that also they could live in such a way that‘death itself became an incidental side issue’ (54).

(3) The universal victim

c)The new Israel and the coming Kingship of God

This chapter is about how the intelligence of the victim went worldwide.

Firstly Alison dispels the idea that the NT texts can be read in any ‘linear’ or chronological way. The same understanding of the intelligence of the victim (for Paul ‘the mind of Christ’) underpins all of the texts – they are all written from the perspective of the resurrection.

Three gospels, ‘Paul indirectly and John differently’refer to Jesus’ meal with his disciples on the night before his death. Alison argues that this was a planned, highly significant event. It was Passover. Passover itself was both a calling by God and an expulsion. Movement towards freedom and towards an expulsion were simultaneous. For Israel‘the memory of its victimary status is constantly kept alive by the memory of the Passover’ (65). The values of this new society were thus meant to be shaped by this memory of slavery and redemption. Independence and equality were stressed – widows, orphans, slaves, exiles were to be able to live with equality - as against neighbouring societies with their feudal, mercantile, slave-dependent structures.

So when Jesus refers to the ‘kingdom of heaven’ his hearers don’ t hear it as a vague reference to abstract qualities such as mercy and peace, they hear a promise about the restoration of Israel as God’s chosen people and the vehicle of His kingdom. For example, Jesus’ teaching about the scribes and Pharisees carries resonances which suggest a comparison with Egypt from whom Israel had to be set free.

Jesus appears to be aware of the salvific act inherent in his celebration of the Passover. At the same time as shifting the meaning of the Passover, with its association of covenant and election, onto his own person he reveals a deep critique of Israel’s faith. Alison argues that by their very rejection of him, the Jewish leaders made possible the revelation of who God really was. What is opened up is the possibility of a new society not based on the propensity to make victims or to exclude, but rather ‘a new way of relating to the victim [which] involves the unlearning of all those patterns of behaviour which depend on, or tend to produce, victims, of whatever sort’. (72)

So, Alison argues, the point of the resurrection was not the internal reform of Judaism. God, as forgiving victim, invites the possibility of a universal humanity which is non-tribal, non-sectarian. The dynamic of the movement begun by the risen Christ is to be understood as that of breaking down cultural, racial and national barriers. In other words it can’t be looked at in a linear historical way as a movement which started with Judaism and moved out.

‘ It was not just that a man rose from the dead, and other men thought that everyone should know about this, and so organised a series of international trips to tell them. No. The man who died and rose again did so as part of a process of making available to the whole of humanity the possibility of forming a new human society which maintains its unity in a completely different way from all human societies…not by excluding, but by serving and worshipping, the victim’ (78-79)

Alison’s challenge in this chapter is to ask whether I build my security over and against some victim, some ‘other’, or whether I am starting to build my identity from the victim.

(4) A Framework of knowing

Alison argues that no-one who really knows the crucified and risen victim can ever again belong exclusively to one group. He critiques Catholics who wish to put a boundary of belonging and exclusivity around the faith – ‘a sectarian belonging’ (91). Knowing this Jesus demands a very deep critique of our ways of belonging. He warns against minorities who claim that they are victimised over against the supposed violent other; these are often themselves involved as victimisers. The position leads to self-justifying behaviours which depend upon comparison with or approval of others.

However, he then argues at length that the Eucharist is ‘pivotal for knowing Jesus’ (93), that ‘Knowing Jesus is inseparable from knowing Jesus in the Eucharist’ (93). From this point a substantial part of the chapter explores the sacramental character of knowing Jesus which in a way feels quite exclusively Catholic and somewhat undermining of the rest of his argument.

A powerful insight of this chapter, and of the conclusion of the book, is that of ‘loosing’. God allows us to kill him, gratuitously forgives us and thereby looses us from being locked into social patterns of violence. Bit by bit we are released from the hardened patterns of relating, old grudges, tribal prejudices into a new relationship with others. Alison makes the point that‘forgive’ means ‘loose’.

In the closing argument, Alison critiques that kind of spirituality which tends to boast, to set the person who claims to know Jesus apart, to in effect be a stumbling block to other people. He criticizes the claim of one event or series of events in becoming ‘saved’ as a substitution for that profound, lengthy and human-bound work of deepening and extending relationships over long periods of time – the slow and profound work of changing one’s life towards the vulnerable and outcast. Over-personalised and emotional claims to ‘know Jesus’ are also at risk of undermining people who do not find such expression for their spiritual reality, as well as marginalising non-believers.

Appropriately, Alison ends with a discussion about Jesus himself, for whom there is no evidence that he was at all interested in people knowing him. Jesus’ concern is that his followers should know the Father.

In conclusion, the illuminating central idea of this book is that knowing Jesus is not quickly learnt. It must be something discovered through the gradual process of turning more and more towards those whom we might otherwise exclude from our lives, freeing ourselves of self-delusion – to know as we are known.

Some questions to consider:

1. What is wrong with any claim to knowing Jesus that doesn’t have practical consequences?

2. To what extent are our responses tribal?

3. What does this mean in terms of learning to stand up for those who are being cast out, especially by those who think that in doing so, they are serving God?

4. What sense does it make to claim that we know the Father apart from our learning of a new fraternity with Jesus and those who are being cast out?

M. Hull

Theologcal discussion: Climate Change

10th May 2012 

The Social Justice Action Group All saints Kings Heath held a theological discussion about Climate Change based on the preface of the book ‘God Species’ by Mark Lynas and a Christian Aid report ‘All Creation Groaning’. We first of all looked at some ideas from the Old Testament. The overall picture is one of a hierarchy of God, Man, and Earth. Mans relation to nature is twofold, firstly he has dominion (Gen 1: 25-29) and secondly stewardship (Leviticus 25: God lays down rules for looking after the land he is going to give to Israel). The problem with this model is that man assumes presumptuous Godlike power, see the story of the fall, when exercising his dominion over the earth. The idea prevails that the earth is there simply for man’s use. The notion of stewardship does not overcome this prevailing idea, but merely becomes subservient to it in the context of the identified hierarchy of God, Man, and Earth. This latter statement can be deduced from the exploitative way man, that is Christian societies, have acted in their engagement with the world.

We went on to look at the New Testament, specifically Luke 10:27- He answered, ‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind”; and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” The argument was developed under the idea of climate justice. It was proposed that now we have the knowledge that enables us to see how our individual and collective (as a society) actions affect others through climate change unsustainable exploitation of the earth’s resources is sinful; in our present society love for our neighbour and the quest for justice that follows from this of necessity encompasses care for the world.